Battlefield 3 RAM Usage

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Cmustang87

Supreme [H]ardness
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Oct 4, 2007
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Hey, I was curious if anyone else was having issues with RAM usage in Battlefield 3. I have to play the game on Medium settings with this rig:

Core 2 Quad QX6850 @ 3.4 Ghz
4GB DDR2
Asus P5Q Pro
Gigabyte 5770SO 1GB GPU @ 940/1350

I can play on high, with some settings on ultra and get butter framerates, but after a while my system RAM usage gets to 100% and won't let up, however I don't have the issue if I lock it to medium settings. Is this common?
 
4g of ram is considered pretty low for a gaming-centric system. I'dd suggest boosting up to 8g.
 
BF3 is one of the few games these days which seems to actually exceed the 4Gb RAM usage (total system usage), any gamers serious about max settings and max frame rates should be considering doubling to 8Gb now, I have 16gb in my rig because RAM is so dirt cheap right now.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
BF3 is one of the few games these days which seems to actually exceed the 4Gb RAM usage (total system usage), any gamers serious about max settings and max frame rates should be considering doubling to 8Gb now, I have 16gb in my rig because RAM is so dirt cheap right now.
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Yea, which isn't the case for me since I"m using DDR2 :(
 
Why does task manager and memory tracker say i have 3.4Gigs of total ram being used out of 4029MB and Battlefield 3 using 1.5Gigs? I don't seem to be hitting 100% ram usage like the OP does. How much RAM does the battlefield 3 process actually use on your rigs?
 
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I'll check later when I get home on the actual usage. My system uses ~1.5GB idle.
 
Having the typical background processes + Chrome + BF3 almost always pushes me over 4 gigs of total system RAM.

It's barely over 4 gigs, but if you only have 4 gigs of RAM, I can see where you would encounter an issue.

Yet another reason an in-game server browser would have been a good idea, even if only as an option.
 
Cmustang87 said:
I'll check later when I get home on the actual usage. My system uses ~1.5GB idle.
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I had the distinct impression that those get moved to the swapfile when an active program needs more ram.
 
Sly said:
I had the distinct impression that those get moved to the swapfile when an active program needs more ram.
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Which causes some serious thrashing in game.

BF3 really needs a modern cpu aka not a dual core and 6-8gb sys ram with a 2gb+ vram gpu or two or three depending on the resolution and settings.

You are done son. Need to upgrade asap.
 
spaceman said:
Which causes some serious thrashing in game.

BF3 really needs a modern cpu aka not a dual core and 6-8gb sys ram with a 2gb+ vram gpu or two or three depending on the resolution and settings.

You are done son. Need to upgrade asap.
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I'm playing at 1920x1080, I doubt I need higher than a 1GB GPU, and my CPU isn't pegged that bad. My RAM usage hits 100% though, but thanks for the pretentious reply.
 
spaceman said:
Which causes some serious thrashing in game.
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Haven't experienced that even before i upgraded to SSD. The only 'thrashing' happens when i quit.

Then again, i put the game and OS on different harddrives.
 
Snowknight26 said:
What? It's a 32-bit application.
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I'm not talking about BF3 memory usage specifically, I'm talking about total system RAM usage, if you boot with a lot of RAM you'll notice windows grabs a load and you don't need to have much running to push that upwards towards the 4Gb mark.

I'm RDP on to my home PC and have steam and chrome running with about 7 tabs and my system is at 2.6Gb usage right now, not that many background processes running either this is a very clean install of windows, got MSE and encryption service, and a few driver processes, that's all.

BigJayDogg3 said:
Having the typical background processes + Chrome + BF3 almost always pushes me over 4 gigs of total system RAM.

It's barely over 4 gigs, but if you only have 4 gigs of RAM, I can see where you would encounter an issue.
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RAM is like that, if you have enough then you have enough, if you run out you get a sharp drop in performance as HDD thrasehs to swap out items in RAM, it's not something that really scales linearly (amount vs performance) it's more binary, if you either have enough for a specific set of tasks or you don't.

4gb has been a stupid and problematic limit and I'll be glad to see the back of it, ideally vista and win7 shouldn't even had 32bit versions to stomp that particular problem into the ground, it's slowly starting to change now, the i7 crowd with tri memory pushed common gaming configs to 6Gb preferable over 3Gb and finally people are going with 8Gb setups in their dual channel setups, although as I said before memory is so ridiculously dirt cheap now you might as well just go nuts with 16gb and be future proofed.
 
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I forgot to mention I also have a Crucial C300 128GB SSD that this game and my OS is installed on.
 
spaceman said:
BF3 really needs a modern cpu aka not a dual core
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Nope.

PrincessFrosty said:
RAM is like that, if you have enough then you have enough, if you run out you get a sharp drop in performance as HDD thrasehs to swap out items in RAM, it's not something that really scales linearly (amount vs performance) it's more binary, if you either have enough for a specific set of tasks or you don't.
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I'm aware. I'm just saying, it such a small amount, even if you get a 2 gig kit to bring the total RAM count to 6GB (not sure if that's a problem with that chipset) you'll still be good. It isn't like you're knocking on 8 gigs of usage.
 
BigJayDogg3 said:
Having the typical background processes + Chrome + BF3 almost always pushes me over 4 gigs of total system RAM.
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^
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This

Google Chrome is great by itself, but man it can take some resources if you have extensions and apps for it. Are you using 32bit windows or 64bit? ... Before I upgraded my PC, I only had 4gigs too. I would always reboot my system before playing bf3. This clears your RAM of any temp stored data it was hording during your browsing or work session. Then I would pull up task manager, sort by memory usage and kill any process that I could spare that was using memory. (sidebar/windows desktop gadgets are big users as well as Chrome with/apps and extensions). Now that that was done, I would look for any other processes hording the CPU. Sometimes you get issues where a "svchost.exe" process is chugging away, but not actually doing anything. Kill it and free the CPU of whatever it was "trying" to do. Its hard to know what causes this sometimes, but it can mean you have a virus working on your PC or some program you installed isn't running right. ... A clean install of windows may help your game sessions.
 
My brother is upgrading to 16gb for bf3 since he gets stuttering and ram gets all used up.
He has 8 now and had 12 but used 4 when he sold his old parts a couple of weeks ago.

I personally haven't played bf3 since I downgraded to 8gb when I sold my old parts a month ago.
 
Pringals said:
^
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This

Google Chrome is great by itself, but man it can take some resources if you have extensions and apps for it. Are you using 32bit windows or 64bit? ... Before I upgraded my PC, I only had 4gigs too. I would always reboot my system before playing bf3. This clears your RAM of any temp stored data it was hording during your browsing or work session. Then I would pull up task manager, sort by memory usage and kill any process that I could spare that was using memory. (sidebar/windows desktop gadgets are big users as well as Chrome with/apps and extensions). Now that that was done, I would look for any other processes hording the CPU. Sometimes you get issues where a "svchost.exe" process is chugging away, but not actually doing anything. Kill it and free the CPU of whatever it was "trying" to do. Its hard to know what causes this sometimes, but it can mean you have a virus working on your PC or some program you installed isn't running right. ... A clean install of windows may help your game sessions.
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One more thing.

Windows does the whole pre loading of apps that you use frequently. If it isn't actually open, when a program makes a request for RAM, Windows will remove the pre-loaded application and allocate it to the new process. This appears like your ram is full, and it is. But being that it can remove things that aren't actually running, you may have a bit more space than you think you do.

That said, it is completely possible you are actually hitting the limits of what your RAM can hold. My vote? Hold off on a RAM upgrade until you make the jump to a new mobo/processor and just get 8+ GB of DDR3.
 
Zepher said:
My brother is upgrading to 16gb for bf3 since he gets stuttering and ram gets all used up.
He has 8 now and had 12 but used 4 when he sold his old parts a couple of weeks ago.

I personally haven't played bf3 since I downgraded to 8gb when I sold my old parts a month ago.
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Can you remember how much ram BF3 uses on an 8Gig rig?
 
BigJayDogg3 said:
I'm aware. I'm just saying, it such a small amount, even if you get a 2 gig kit to bring the total RAM count to 6GB (not sure if that's a problem with that chipset) you'll still be good. It isn't like you're knocking on 8 gigs of usage.
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Sure if you're strapped for cash and you have an upgrade path to allow just another 2Gb upgrade then just go to 6 but for new systems to meet criteria of installing in pairs and leaving enough room for future upgrades a simple 2x4Gb sticks is best, leaving room for up to 16Gb.

Honestly though with the extreme volatility in price of RAM and the current low price you'd be crazy not to just whack in 16Gb, it could spike a few months/years down the road and that same upgrade could cost way more, been burnt by that in the past.

my 16Gb PC12800 was something like £82 IIRC, that's a corsair 4x4Gb set with heat spreaders...that's dirt cheap in my book :)
 
BigJayDogg3 said:
That said, it is completely possible you are actually hitting the limits of what your RAM can hold. My vote? Hold off on a RAM upgrade until you make the jump to a new mobo/processor and just get 8+ GB of DDR3.
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That's what my thoughts are as well. I don't want to spend the dough to upgrade my RAM. Depending on kepler and Ivybridge numbers I may be making a platform jump in the next 2-3 months.

Thanks.
 
Cmustang87 said:
I'm playing at 1920x1080, I doubt I need higher than a 1GB GPU
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Depending on your settings BF3 can use a lot more than 1Gig of video memory even at 1080p. There are lots of threads about BF3 VRAM usage in the video card forum.
 
I wasn't really addressing you directly with that statement, just upgrades and new systems in general.
 
Sly said:
Can you remember how much ram BF3 uses on an 8Gig rig?
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After playing a few rounds of caspian, the memory usage seemed to top out at about 1.7Gigs on my 4Gig rig.

After googling, according to the people with 8 gigs of memory, BF3 also only used 1.7 or 1.8 gigs (depending on how you round it off)
 
When I had 4gigs I was having severe CTD issues, pretty much crashed on every map change. Since I bumped up to 8gigs I have had zero problems. This game is a bit of a resource hog
 
I couldn't believe the difference in BC2 when I went from 3x1gb to 3x2gb. Nothing stutters at all, even in BF3. Getting over that 4gb mark with a 64bit Windows was one of my favorite things I've done to my computer
 
Sly said:
Can you remember how much ram BF3 uses on an 8Gig rig?
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I'll ask him when he gets home tonight. I'll fire up mine when I get home and see what mine is at.
 
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